Macbook start-up but stays on white screen and then clicking noice

I was working on my macbook and suddenly it just became incredibly slow and then it was non-responsive. So I shut it off, and when I turned it back on, it was just a white screen, with the clicking noice in the bottom right corner and then a question mark symbol came up in the middle of the screen and now I can't access any of my important files that I need, Someone help please!!

If you have another computer and a FireWire cable you can try booting this computer into Target Disk Mode by holding the T key at bootup, and then attach the computer to another one via the FireWire cable. This should allow the second computer to see your computer's drive as an external disk.
Alternatively you can try booting up off the Leopard DVD and see if you can access the drive from the Disk Utility software on the DVD. This will be available in the "Utilities" menu after you select your language. From here you can try running a drive repair and hope you can at least get it to be readable.
Unfortunately beyond this, and without any other drive utility software, there's not much you can do without taking it to a technician who can hopefully remove the drive and read data off of it with special hardware. When drives go bad they tend to just stop working altogether.

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